WND

Trump announces Kim summit on again

President meets with top N. Korean official: 'We're going to deal'

Art Moore, co-author of the best-selling book "See Something, Say Nothing," entered the media world as a PR assistant for the Seattle Mariners and a correspondent covering pro and college sports for Associated Press Radio. He reported for a Chicago-area daily newspaper and was senior news writer for Christianity Today magazine and an editor for Worldwide Newsroom before joining WND shortly after 9/11. He earned a master's degree in communications from Wheaton College.

President Trump announces June 1, 2018, to reporters the summit with Kim Jong Un is on again, scheduled for June 12 (Screenshot)

After announcing last week that the planned historic summit with North Korean’s Kim Jong Un had been canceled because of the dictator’s “tremendous anger and open hostility,” President Trump said Friday after meeting with a top North Korean aide that the summit will take place June 12 in Singapore as originally planned.

And the summit could bring about the official end of the Korean War, Trump told reporters on the White House lawn.

“I think it’s probably going to be a very successful, ultimately a successful process,” he said.

Trump said his meeting Friday in the Oval Office with Kim Yong Chol, Kim Jong Un’s top aide, was a “great start,” confirming the official gave him a personal letter from the North Korean dictator.

Trump said a meeting that was intended to be only about “the delivery of a letter,” which he said he had not read yet, turned out to be an extended conversation with the “second most powerful man in North Korea” that led to restoration of the summit.

“We talked about a lot of things,” Trump said. “We really did. But the big deal will be on June 12.”

On Friday, however, Trump was posing for photos on the White House lawn with Kim Yong Chol, the highest-ranking North Korean official to visit the United States since Vice Marshal Jo Myong Rok visited Washington in 2000 to meet President Bill Clinton.

In his May 24 letter canceling the summit, Trump said he believed that based “on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting.’

“Therefore, please let this letter serve to represent that the Singapore summit, for the good of both parties, but to the detriment of the world, will not take place.” North Korea responded by insisting the U.S. bore responsibility for any breakdown in negotiations

Trump ‘holds the cards’

Last week, an Asia expert said he still believed the meeting would take place, insisting Trump “holds the cards” and “the most important thing is not what Kim wants, but what is President Trump willing to do.”

U.S. and U.N. sanctions, pointed out Gordon Chang have been “crimping the flow of money to North Korea” and Kim “does not want the U.S. to strike both his missile and nuclear facilities.”

Chang explained that what has made Trump’s approach different than previous presidents is the sanctions and the president’s declarations of his willingness to use force, “that he will not allow North Korea to strike the homeland.”

In addition, the appointments of Mike Pompeo as secretary of state and John Bolton as national security adviser have “unnerved the North Koreans, and also the South Koreans and the Chinese.”

As WND noted in an analysis one year ago, Pyongyang’s chief tactic since 1994 could be described as “nuclear blackmail,” essentially issuing periodic threats to launch a nuclear missile at U.S. allies in Asia, or the U.S. itself, followed by negotiations, an easing of sanctions and aid.

Chang said there is a “Kim family playbook” that Kim Jong Un learned from his father, Kim Jong Il, and his grandfather.

A recent defection illustrated that China is not as cooperative as it once was in helping Pyongyang punish defectors.

In February, a senior North Korean official named Kang, stationed in northeast China, slipped across the border and took top secret documents with him.

The North Korean government dispatched seven agents into China with orders to find Kang and execute him immediately.

The Strategy Page said the agents failed, “apparently because they were unable to obtain sufficient assistance from their Chinese counterparts.”

Another three agents, more experienced and better financed, were then sent after Kang with the same “execute on sight” orders.

But Kang managed to make his way to a European country, a NATO member, where he has sought asylum.

The Strategy Page noted that after a 2016 incident in which Thae Yong Ho, a senior North Korean diplomat, escaped with his wife and two sons to South Korea, Pyongyang ordered that senior officials posted abroad could no longer take their immediate families with them.

In Kang’s case, however, his son had recently been accused of corrupt activities and was apparently going to be punished.